This report is organized into six chapters. The first chapter provides an introduction and presents a brief situation analysis of current research and development and manufacturing capacities in the region based on detailed desk review. The second chapter describes the importance of coordination...

This paper explores the massive strides that were made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by national drug regulatory agencies (NRAs) in order to achieve what ultimately became the fastest incidence in human history of the development, testing, approval, manufacture, and distribution of a new...

The global health crisis that came to be known as the COVID-19 pandemic and started to sweep across the world in early 2020 revealed many vulnerabilities in the economic, social, and political fabric underpinning what much of the world had come to accept as normal. In ways that we are still...

Timely and equitable access to vaccines and other health technologies is vital in effectively responding to pandemics and treating other communicable diseases. This paper shows how countries might overcome real or purported intellectual property (IP) barriers to regional COVID-19 vaccine...

This paper empirically investigates the state of trade interdependency for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) essential medical goods-vaccines and their value chains, personal protective equipment, and diagnostic test kits-across 29 Asia and the Pacific economies. Expanding on Hayakawa and Imai...

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was signed on 15 November 2020 by 15 Asian-Pacific countries (ASEAN-Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam-, and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand),...